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Hood ranks high with veterans

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militaryBy Taylor Gigeous//

“It is exciting to again be recognized as a Best Value college. We continually strive to make Hood affordable while also ensuring an excellent education for our students,” Hood President Andrea Chapdelaine said.

Hood College was ranked 21st in the Best Values Colleges for Veterans to attend in the north region. The college offers many different military resources to ensure that Veterans are provided with any and all resources to be successful in their experience at Hood.

Hood specifically offers a unique way of assisting students in attending college and becoming an Army officer. The U.S. Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) offers two, three, and four year full-tuition scholarships.  The scholarships also provide a monthly stipend and book money. After completing all requirements to graduate cadets commission as Army officers with the rank of second lieutenant. They have the choice of serving on Active Duty, the Army Reserve or the National Guard.

Select Cadets who choose National Guard get chosen to participate in the SMP program. This means a cadet will attend drill and preform as a regular guard member. CDT Durham, a three year scholarship winner, said, “ROTC provides many experiences for me that many do not get to go through.”

She went on to tell how the structure of waking up early and attending physical training (PT) has given her more discipline. CDT Durham is also an SMP cadet. She attends ranges to qualify and shoot many different weapons systems that an everyday person and even other cadets in the program.

CDT Afriyie is a graduate student.  He would not have been able to attend college is he did not get the two year scholarship from ROTC to assist in paying his tuition. He served two years in the National Guard before becoming a graduate student.

“Being a college student and participating in ROTC does have its down falls. We devote a minimum of 10 hours a week doing ROTC activities and sometimes even long weekends in the field.” Said CDT Afriyie.

Being a student, cadet, and guard member all at the same time limited CDT Afriyie with his free time. He has no free time to have a job to make any extra income. But he mentioned frequently if it wasn’t for ROTC he would be getting his master.

HM3 Jacob is a potential Hood student. He was granted tuition assistance to go back and attend a college of his choice to complete his degree. For two years he has tried to attend online school and work full time at the hospital on base but it became extremely overwhelming. Attending Hood will give him the opportunity to take a break in his field of work and further his career by getting his bachelors.

Many Veterans attend Hood College, currently serving and retired members. The school has very helpful resources and a veterans community that his supportive and encouraging. Being a Veteran has it owns struggles and combining it with being a student have be easy for some and hard for others. The community that Hood has provided the veterans is special.

 

New plan adds to parking woes

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parking chart

A Hood driver searches for parking place.

A Hood driver searches for parking place.

By Natalie Kendall//For years, the parking at Hood College has been a problem for years, with more individuals than parking spaces. Earlier this year, Hood put into place a new parking plan to try to handle the parking dilemma on campus. While it was hopeful that this new parking plan would solve the problems, alas it did not. Ever since the plan was put into place it has been even harder than normal to find parking spaces.

“Throughout the years,” Thurmond Maynard, the director and chief of campus security at Hood College, said, “parking has been an ongoing issue that the College is trying to improve with this plan. With minimal spaces to utilize, it has been a difficult challenge that will need to take time and adjustments.”

Maynard stated that the initiative behind the plan was “to be able to maximize parking lots and have spaces throughout the campus dedicated to different members of the community.” While the reasons behind this plan were valiant, its outcome was less than helpful, at least from the eyes of many students and staff and faculty.

parking spaces

Maynard, gave an in depth analysis about the parking spaces on campus. He said the spaces can be broken up into percentages between commuters, residents, faculty/staff, general parking, and reserved parking. According to him, 34% of the spaces are dedicated to commuters, 30% are for residents, 20% are for faculty/staff, 7% are for general parking, which can include commuters, residents, faculty/staff, and visitors, and 9% is for reserved parking for visitors, motorcycles, handicapped, and contractors.

There are 659 marked parking spaces on Hood College property. Of those parking spaces there are 127 staff/faculty spaces, 198 resident student spaces, and 224 commuter student spaces. While this may seem like a lot of spaces, when you look at the number of spaces in comparison to the number of individuals on campus it becomes quickly apparent how few spaces there really are.

Of the 659 parking spaces on campus, 549 of these are marked for staff/faculty, residents, and commuters, with the last 90 spaces marked for general parking. In comparison, there are 2,437 staff, faculty, and students on campus. This creates a ratio of about four individuals to one parking space. However, this ratio doesn’t account for the amount of visitors on a regular basis or for special events.

While the ratio of overall spaces to individuals is one to four, the ratios between the marked spaces and their designated persons range from one to three for staff/faculty and one to six for commuters. This drastic ratio for commuters has caused a lot of problems since the plan was put in place with a lot of complaints because of the lack of spaces designated for commuters. Maynard said, “Some adjustments were made after implementing the initial plan to dedicate more parking for commuter students, who make up the largest population of the community.” While this is helpful for commuters it hasn’t completely fixed the problem with lack of spaces. “Continued assessments and suggestions will be taken and shared,” Maynard said, “with senior management in an effort to maximize parking on campus.”

While there are 659 parking spaces on campus, 905 people have applied for a parking pass, which is less than half of the total individuals on campus. According to Maynard, everyone who has registered for a parking pass has picked up their parking pass.

While it is a good idea to try to help parking all over Hood College’s campus, the reality of the matter is there is just not enough space for parking. The college will continue to put effort into trying to improve the parking problems on campus. It will be interesting to see where parking on campus will go over the next couple years and if it will ever be solved.

Hood broadcast studio goes on air

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Jeff Welsh mans the control room of the new TV studio.

Jeff Welsh mans the control room of the new TV studio.


By Mike Amatucci//
Hood College’s Communication Arts program unveiled its new, state-of-the-art television broadcast studio in Rosenstock Hall Thursday.

“In the last year-and-a-half, we have been trying to find ideas to broaden the options for Communications students,” said Tim Jacobsen, an adjunct professor at Hood, “I also work down at the University of Maryland and they have a lot of programs down there that consist of student-run broadcast programs in which I act as a faculty adviser to that…and there are just a bunch of skills sets to learn by using that technology.”

The dedication ceremony involved Hood College Communication Arts students, alumni, teachers and faculty alike – along with the President Andrea Chapdelaine – participating in the ribbon cutting ceremony just outside the studio on the third floor of Rosenstock Hall.

Like so many other colleges and universities across the country, Hood College has now boosted its Communication Arts program with the addition of this new television studio. A $20,000 grant from the Delaplaine Foundation along with additional funding from the school’s administration and alumni made this project a reality, all while being facilitated by Hood’s own Elizabeth Atwood, Donna Bertazzoni, Jacobsen and Jeff Welsh of the IT Department.
“We see this as a three-phase project,” Bertazzoni said. Ultimately this will aim to renovate the entire third floor of Rosenstock Hall into a complete center for communications classes, students and faculty in the department.

“We have put in a second grant proposal to the Delaplaine Foundation to renovate Rosenstock 305 into a Mac lab,” Bertazzoni said, “and what would happen is that we would shift our classes from Rosenstock 219 upstairs and we would have students be able to – for example – write a broadcast script, then go into the studio and read it off the teleprompter so they could get some experience that way.”

With a recent, heightened interest in the communications and journalism fields, Jacobsen recounted that Hood’s main goal in moving forward with this idea started with a simple question.

“What can we do to bring something here that would be more of a recruitment tool,” Jacobsen said, “and to give the students that are here a more well-balanced, rounded experience to make them more prepared to find jobs?”
With the amount of new technology located in the studio – soundboards, teleprompters, monitors, lighting, etc. – Hood students with an interest in the Communication Arts will get a chance to work hands-on with the equipment of today’s media industries, exposing them to a whole new level of creative prowess previously they never would have gotten to experience otherwise if it wasn’t for the efforts of Dr. Atwood and her colleagues.

“She went to a variety of colleges and toured them,” Bertazzoni – a professor of Journalism at Hood – added, “and put together a proposal for a broadcast studio that would allow us, first of all, to better teach our students better things having to do with broadcasting – whether it is sitting at an anchor desk and reading off a teleprompter, being behind the camera, etc. – and enhance the quality of our program, but at the same time we wanted to have something that was exciting and new that would attract students to the program.”

“Over the summer, I took part in – along with Jeff Welsh,” Jacobsen added, “finding and putting a lot of the equipment together so it was kind of like Christmas but then once you open the present you realize that you have to put everything together.”

For sophomore student-athlete and communications major Scott Kiewe, the establishment of a news studio on campus is already a step in the right direction as far as a career goes.
“It has always been my dream to become a news anchor for a television station, and now that Hood has the technology and resources, I will now be able to further pursue my aspirations and get the training I need following my graduation.”

Kiewe is currently enrolled in Jacobsen’s Visual Media Production I class at Hood. Although the class is held in the Tatem Arts Center, Jacobsen’s curriculum consists of working with DSLR cameras and Adobe software – specifically Premiere Pro – to learn the basics of camera operation and digital media editing. These basic skills will be vital to Kiewe and other student’s transition into Visual Media Production II in the spring semester where they will be working more diligently in the broadcast studio.

A class project of CMA 304.